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We're more than a little surprised that earlier this week, Lomography met their Kickstarter funding goal in one day for a gadget that allows you to use your cellphone as a negative scanner. Isn't film supposed to be dead? At the time of this writing the company has more than doubled its original goal of $50,000.
"We wanted to offer a convenient way to have negatives scanned without having to connect to a computer and think too much about the process," says Angela Bilog, the chief of marketing and PR for Lomography USA.
Officially called the Lomography Smartphone Film Scanner, the device works by backlighting a color/B&W negative or a slide so you can take a picture of it with your iPhone or a limited number of Androids. The company is building an app for both platforms that then converts the negative image into a positive, lets you edit the image and finally share your snaps on a variety of social media sites.
In many ways it's just the opposite of the Impossible Project's “Instant Lab,” which transfers your iPhone photos to instant film.
The scans you get with the Smartphone Film Scanner are limited by the resolution of your smartphone camera, which means they're big enough to post on Instagram, but will never compare to a real film scanner. The Hasselblad Flextight X5, for example, will give you an 8000 dpi scan off a 35mm negative (a shitload of resolution) but it also costs $25,000.
The product is expected to arrive in backers' hands by March and a limited number of backers can secure one of these bad boys for a $50 contribution. Bilog says the company is still working on a final retail price.
It's not the Austrian-based company's first foray into hardware construction so we can probably expect a well-made product. Over the company's 20 year history, its reproduced a number of old cameras, including the Diana, and even built its own including the LomoKino 35mm Movie Cameraand the Spinner360°.
